Vegetarianism is not the healthier option for humans, or the environment and veganism is dangerous. These diets are especially dangerous for women planning to have children, pregnant woman and babies, children etc.
I have not yet met a vegan child who's first set of teeth aren't rotting from decay or who's physical and mental development isn't way behind. These babies and children eat healthy foods that are vegan and usually organic foods so the problem isn't food quality, its food choice! Remember our teeth are the windows into our body, if teeth are rotting so are our bones! Decay, especially in the first set of teeth are a clear sign that the body is in complete physical degeneration not able to be corrected. Able to be improved with dietry changes but not reversed.
Vegetarianism may work if you DON'T plan to have children and include lots of sunshine, raw dairy from pasture fed animals ( fermented if digestion isn't up to scratch ) like full fat milk, cheese and butter. Raw dairy is also loaded with beneficial bacteria! Raw dairy is illegal in Australia, sadly so this food source isn't avail to all. Also important are top quality eggs from pasture fed chooks as our fat soluble vitamins come from grass fed animals and animal products such as True vitamin A, D ( best vegie source is sunshine ) and K2. Also B12 comes from animals eating grass! No true usable B12 comes from plant foods except insect stuff on unwashed organic veg and fruit.
The best thing we can do for eachother, our unborn children, the environment and animals is to eat foods that are as local as possible, organic / bio-dynamic and mostly nutrient dence foods in their whole state for example, meat with the FAT, egg white with the YOLK, full FAT unprocessed milk etc. We need to eat liver and other organ meats and get back to basics like rich gelatinous bone broth. Fruit and veg are NOT nutrient dense! These foods nourished indigenous cultures for thousands of years before contact with civilization and its modern processed foods such as white flour and sugar. In good health we contribute to and nurture our world and in bad health we suck and or destroy.
Any one interested in some honest outstanding research on health and our environment see www.westonaprice.org buy the book " Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Dr Weston A Price and Sally Fallon's " Nourishing Tradition" for Price's summary and recipes.
Dr Price travelled the world for 10 years in the 1920's and 30's living with 14 different indigenous cultures including our Australian Aborigines, American Indian's, Swiss, Gaelic's, African tribes etc who enjoyed physical perfection! These isolated groups had less than %1 tooth decay ( never cleaned their teeth with brushes, paste or floss! ) their jaws were fully developed with room for all of the teeth including wisdom teeth and their smiles were beautiful and perfect! These people did not suffer with our physical diseases or mental health problems and woman birthed their babies easily. There were no birth deformities and it was this way for thousands of years until they had contact with our modern foods and this contact caused the same physical degeneration we suffer today in the next children born being narrowed jaw / crowded teeth, narrowed pelvice, lowered immunity, mental illness etc.
Weston Price was particularly interested in finding what foods were causing the increasing degeneration and decay in young children he saw in his Cleavland dental clinic but was also interested is vegetarianism being a spiritual man.
Most significantly Dr Price found no evidence of a %100 vegetarian diet that supported good health. In contrast these groups ate many of their animal foods raw both land and sea and they ate between 30% and 80% saturated fat! Grains were rarely eaten and never consumed without being first fermented. Fruit and veg were only a small part of some of these diets.
Veganism is out right dangerous. We can do nothing to contribute if we are sick! Everything living feeds of living foods and this is how the world goes round. There are right ways and wrong ways to go about this living and feeding but avoiding meat or animal products does more harm and no good!
In good health, evil, greedy, polluting, destructive and toxic corporations such at the pharmaceuticals go unsupported and evenually they will die out!

don't get me wrong, i think what you've done is fantastic.

and i agree with you that going cold turkey is hard. going vegetarian cold turkey is probably unhealthy, there probably aren't enough bacteria in the gut of non-vegies to be able to get enough iron and protein from vegetable sources. you need to do it slowly so that the balance of bacteria can be given time to change. from the reading i've done i'd think 1 - 2 years would be about the amount of time it would take a person to become vego.

this is of assuming that going totally vego is in fact the goal. even though i'm vegetarian, based on the figures, i don't think it is *necessary* (and certainly not reasonable) for people to become vegetarian to have a positive impact on climate change. because it is really only beef and lamb that are responsible for significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

if my significant other is anything to go by, replacing beef and lamb with kangaroo, chicken, pork, rabbit, and duck isn't really that difficult, and certainly much easier than becoming a vegetarian.

i don't really care about vegetarianism, i care about climate change. specifically, stopping it in it's tracks!

becoming vegetarian won't have much more of an impact on climate change than simply becoming a slightly fussy meat eater by cutting out meat from ruminant animals.